Voord 99

When one talks about default Pendragon only having one type of character, that’s true in a sense, but I think sometimes people perhaps look at it from the perspective of other games, and treat knight as a sort of character class, or template, or playbook, or whatever the game calls it. That’s not quite right — knight is a secular social position, not just a set of competencies. It’s a position that (especially early on) is filled by heavily-armoured cavalry warriors, but not all people who are heavily-armoured cavalry warriors are knights, even those who are of noble birth. (In the later Middle Ages, an awful lot of professional cavalry soldiers of noble birth chose to spend their entire military careers as esquires, in Pendragon terms, because knighting was horribly expensive. Militarily, the main distinction of a knight at that point was that only knights could be commanders.) Pendragon is a game about a certain level of society, and it does not accommodate all that easily people who do not move in knightly circles. That can be expanded readily enough — ladies, esquires, clergy all rub shoulders with knights. If one reoriented the game towards court intrigue, one could have a game with a wide range of different types of people, and I think even a default game could benefit from having more detailed support for such familiar figures in a knight’s world. You could also have esquires as PCs in a fairly normal Pendragon game without changing too much except for the romance assumption that only knights are heroes. Alternatively, a very combat-oriented game about gritty medieval warfare could break with the default assumption that the game is about noble society, and feature not only esquires but commoner professional soldiers. However,I think one might wonder whether, if taken beyond a certain point, such options would really benefit from the Arthurian setting — realistically, the romance tradition is not about those sorts of things very much, and one of the great things about Pendragon is that it mixes a realistic-ish medieval English knight simulator with non-realistic romance material, meaning that there’s a lot of variety in the game experience.

For battles, there are default amounts in the Book of Battle — I don’t think that there are amounts given in the core 5e book, but I may have missed it. The Book of Uther and GPC have scripted battles with set amounts of plunder for each (if the battle results in plunder). Only Decisive Victories give plunder, and those are quite hard to achieve with the BoB against any equivalent enemy, so it might not come up that much outside the scripted BoU/GPC battles. Skirmish is a vague category that basically just means a combat with too many combatants to track individually, but not a large enough number to count as an actual battle. So of its nature there can’t be rules — it would depend on why the skirmish was taking place (e.g. was it a raid in which you were trying to plunder others, or are you the ones fighting off the raiders and trying to stop them from plundering you). But skirmishes can easily result in ransoms (which are more lucrative than plunder a lot of the time), and there are amounts for those on p.188 of the core 5e book.

Not an area I know an enormous amount about but some meagre thoughts: There were no clear rules on this. Or more accurately, there were rules, more than one of them, and they contradicted each other, because chivalry developed over time and was contested. Initially, knights developed gradually out of mounted warriors attached to a nobleman — it’s more a matter of a certain kind of aristocratic warrior becoming identified as being in a special category, and it’s really fuzzy. At what point does a leader giving arms formally to a follower — a ceremony that may have Germanic origins that go back to at least 100 A.D. — become “knighting” that follower? At any rate, once chivalry existed as an idea, people (unsurprisingly) fought over who would control entry into this special category. If you look at a book of chivalry like Lull or de Charny (which I have not read — this is based on references in stuff that talks about them), they will probably say something along the lines that only a knight could dub another knight. However, ecclesiastical authors tried very hard to establish that no, only the Church could make a knight, and there are versions of the dubbing ceremony in which a priest does it. It’s part of that great übertheme of medieval history, the power struggle between clergy and secular nobility. Generally speaking, the knights won this one, and the Church lost, and the clearest overall rule of thumb across Europe is that being a knight is the minimum qualification for making a knight. But the identity of the knight who dubs was very important: they were thought to be guaranteeing on their own honour the honour of the person they knighted. (I like the stuff in 4e‘s Book of Knights in which you get additional Glory based on who knighted you.) There’s a fun complication here: we talk as if the source material for Pendragon “reflects” medieval ideas, but that’s not actually the case. Chivalric romance was one of the main things that helped develop the idea of chivalry and then spread it — it’s not something that passively reflected a set of standard ideas, but something that actively shaped them. What a knight was could be quite different in different places: in the more dynamic world of medieval Italian cities, you might find commoner knights from quite low social origins (something which could be adapted for urban “Roman” knights, those rather unconvincing figures, in Pendragon), while in Germany you have ministeriales, unfree knights whose legal position was not unlike that of serfs elsewhere (but who were of course not very much like serfs at all from a social standpoint). Yet calling all these people “knights” is however basically accurate in an important sense, because they self-defined as that, basing their sense of who they were by importing what were essentially a set of ideas that were developed in what is now France, but are ultimately something that can be found in recognizably similar forms across a wide area. This spread of chivalry didn’t happen solely through the medium of the stories of Chrétien and others. (Obviously, in England, the main thing that happened was that Normans conquered the place and brought the way that people were thinking in what is now northern France with them.) In the Vulgate, for instance, when Lancelot works out a way to be knighted by Guenevere, should we read that as “reflecting” a standard unsurprising assumption that a woman can knight? Or, in light of categorical statements that only a knight (implicitly, a man) can knight, should we read that as part of the process by which the author is staking a position on how knighthood should be understood, that it’s meant to strike the reader as a bold departure from expectations, a statement about how important love is. I’m not a specialist in medieval literature, but I’d have to wonder if the second is at least possible. Most of the above comes from Maurice Keen’s Chivalry, which is where I’d start looking for more information. My local university library is closed, so I don’t have access to a copy.

The nice thing about medieval literature is that a lot of it consists of the same motifs repeated. So you could save the parts you didn’t use for a future adventure, and when your players say, “Hang on, didn’t we already have a story about three brothers and three castles?” you can reply, “Yes. That’s the point.” 🙂

It was a bit more complicated than that. There is plenty of buying and selling land in England in the later middle ages. Technically, it’s not buying and selling the land itself, which in England (the continent is different) belongs to the crown — it’s buying and selling estates in the land. But in practice, it’s pretty much the same thing. It’s land held by fee simple, though, not the kind of land held by knight service with which PKs are typically concerned. That being said, I believe that people by the 13th century could conceive of even land held per baronium as something that they could sell, because the king’s tenants in chief were doing so and the king had to issue an ordinance banning the practice and directing his sheriffs to seize all such land. EDIT: Looked into this a bit more, and nailed down the dates a bit. People are certainly trying to sell lands held by knight service (or by serjeantry, which encompasses a wide range of different kinds of service) by 1217, because that appears to be the first evidence for the king trying to restrict it (by forbidding the alienation of lands where that would interfere with the seller carrying out their obligations).

Early on, that might be true — ransom was a distinct mark of noble status, and is in some ways a method by which the noble martial class rigged the game so that they were less at risk in war than their inferiors, and then proceeded to call this rigging of the game chivalry and honour. This changes over time, though — by the time of the Hundred Years War, commoners were quite often ransomed. This makes sense, when one bears in mind that an awful lot of ransoms happened due to the negotiated surrender of garrisons, and there is little point in a garrison commander trying to negotiate a surrender in which his men all get slaughtered, as they are unlikely to go along with the plan. In 1449, for instance, there was a surrender in which all the archers were ransomed for £2.5 each.

I must admit, my eye went straight to “under mysterious circumstances.” Obviously, you don’t want to spoil the mystery for your players by saying what those were here. But whatever entity is responsible — do they have a next move?

Anno CDLXXXIX: Utherpendragon rex in Cornubiam cum exercitu perrexit, sed proelium non factum est; nam Gorlois dux Cornubiae regi se dedidit et de culpa sua paenituit. Deinde Uterpendragon rex Loegriae Dei gratia rex Britannorum electus est. Eodem anno Godefridus miles gregarius Sarisburiensis repperit quod soror sua Melei, quae septem ante annis refugisse visa esset, re vera clam abducta esset a militibus quibusdam Warwicensibus, qui consanguinei Einion mariti illius mulieris erant, quem Madocus princeps in monomachia interfecerat. Quo reperto, Godefridus atque alii viri, inter quos non solum erat cognati sui sed etiam Gerontius, amicus suus, ad Warwicum iter fecerunt, ubi pugnam inierunt cum illis militibus qui illius abductionis infamia se maculaverant. In qua pugna milites Warwicenses superati sunt, sed Godefridus gravissime vulneratus est; quae contritiones a Gerontio tanta scientia alligatae sunt ut non moreretur Godefridus sed Deo adiuvante viveret. Interea Meleri inventa liberataque est. As usual, the first paragraph is the canon “History of Logres” section (which this time is a very skewed version of the GPC events). The final sentence (Deinde Uterpendragon rex Loegriae Dei gratia rex Britannorum electus est) is an addition, saying that Uther was elected High King. Which as far as I can tell is not explicitly assigned to any year in the GPC, although I may have missed something. In any case, I think it works well in 489, setting up his victory in 490 to be the peak of his reign, before he $%#^’s everything up.

Anno CDLXXXVIII: Eo anno, Uterpendragon rex Loegriae Madocum principem, filium suum, cum exercitu in Galliam misit Syagrio Romanorum regi subvenire, cuius regnum Franci sibi subjugaverant. Sed mox Madocus ad Britanniam rediit, postquam Bagias cepit nec cum Francis aliter conflixit; nam reperti sunt homines Britanni inter Syagrii milites, qui a Sulien duce Bedegraniae exiliati erant. Horum exulum unus erat Brannud ille miles gregarius, a quo frater Godefridi, Germanus miles beatae memoriae, in proelio victus occisusque erat. Nihilominus Godefridus Brannudque amicabiliter alius alium invicem tractabant, ut militibus veris sincerisque decebat. Gerontius quoque cum Madoco ad Galliam transierat, et, cum exercitus Britannorum Bagias oppugnarent, fortiter ab ambobus militibus Sarisburiensibus pugnatum est. Et antea quoque eo anno Godefridus specimen nobilis militiae ostentaverat; nam, cum Rodericum comitem ad aulam regis comitatus esset, certus factus est se a multis hominibus calumniari. Hos pravos rumores quis finxisset, nullo modo discooperiri potuit; sed mulier erat Bedegraniae, quae mentiente ore repetebat quae audierat. Qua vindicata, monomachiam fecit Godefridus cum Segurant milite, qui vir clarissimus defensor illius mulieris erat, et, cum concertarent, Godefridus victor exstitit. Hoc anno quoque Gerontius miles dapifer Roderici comitis factus est. “This is another year in which the interpolator or someone else has woven the two strands of material together. The join is rather obvious here, for it is appears that the author of the Logres material regards Prince Madoc’s anger at the presence of the British exiles among Syagrius’ men as justified, whereas the author of the Salisbury strand admires Godfrey’s willingness to forgive the killer of his brother.” We’re pretty much on track for the GPC chronology-wise, with the invasion of France and the capture of Bayeux. As usual, the first paragraph is devoted to the canon events. However, the last bit (nam reperti sunt homines Britanni inter Syagrii milites, qui a Sulien duce Bedegraniae exiliati erant) is added detail that should be removed if you want to transfer this to your own campaign

For me, those are very different. When you’re playing really solo, at least the way I do it, the system is the GM as much as possible. One leans very heavily on random tables (and very possibly uses something like Mythic or Ironsworn as well). What makes Pendragon especially suitable is, as Prometheus878 points out above, that Traits and Passions mean that you can do this for the player side as well. In some ways, you are neither player nor GM, nor a combination of the two, but something a little different from both, observing the story develop from the outside. I find that I regard the main characters as something more like characters in a novel than as “my” characters. Whereas 1 GM + 1 player is a variant on the standard RP experience. Which I also prefer — it’s creative in a way that solo play just isn’t, plus, of course, there’s the social aspect of it. I’ve essentially done the solo stuff mostly when I wasn’t playing with a group, which is why my current one is intermittent. But solo play does have its own special quality. There’s something about the randomness of it all, the way that strong and distinct characters emerge that you weren’t expecting to emerge.

For inspiration: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-41612817 Only goes back to the 15th century, admittedly.

I’ve done it a couple of times, although not yet all the way through. (Once wasn’t the GPC, but The Boy King — that one got up to 531; the other one I do intermittently now, and is in 496.) Both times what I did was start with one knight and his squire and take it from there, with the squire becoming a second knight if he lived to be knighted, with two new squires, and so on. In principle, that’s an exponential progression, but survival in Pendragon being what it is, it’s turned out both times that it seemed to stabilize at about 2-3 knights at any one time. That might change if I were to get past the period with a lot of battles, though.

“Caolifynn”. This mispelling is interestingish, as it suggests that you may be pronouncing the f in Caoilfhionn. This is my entry for Most Pedantic Comment. 🙂

The widow’s portion is to some degree a question of just how far you want to go down the road of King Arthur Pendragon: Exciting Adventures in Medieval Litigation and the Development of the Common Law. In the real world, there were a lot of court cases about dower (what this is called in law) — there were, I believe, cases where mothers ended up suing their sons for not giving them what they were entitled to. I’m not an expert, but I’ve looked into this a bit. Some thoughts:- - There isn’t a commercial market in “knightly real estate” as such. In principle, I believe you can alienate land held by knight service, but as you’re still liable for the knight service, you’re not likely to do so to any significant extent. The instinct, I think, was always to amass land, not to alienate it unless in truly desperate circumstances. Endowments are the main exception, and those are obviously about the care of your immortal soul. There are plenty of instances of people paying kings to make them baron of such-and-such, though, and I’m sure that such things also happened at lower levels of the hierarchy. But it would be a large sum of money, and involve loyalty, politics etc. —this is an enormous favor, and one always wants to ask why it’s not going to some deserving household knight or somesuch. Cf. heiresses (a more normal way to acquire land). As it happens, the law of dower discouraged the development of a market in landed property, even where the land was held by fee simple (no service). The wife doesn’t get 1/3 of what the husband has at the time of his death — she gets 1/3 of whatever he had at any point during the marriage, even if he has sold or given it to someone else. This prevents obvious dodges such as giving your property to your brother before you die to prevent your wife getting her dower. Heirs were expected to compensate buyers for this after the death of the seller, so a husband would be directly damaging his heir if he alienated property to which his wife had a claim. On the whole, the heir is more likely to look for other ways to supplement his income, such as marrying well (since the main effect is to make it difficult for him to support a wife and children, a dowry is the natural thing that might compensate), office, plunder, winning tournaments, adding improvements, etc. -In reality, of course, the heir is often the son of the widow, and she will go on living in the manor with him after his father’s death. In fact, she has a right to do so (freebench), although it varied from place to place for how long she could do so, and exactly how it worked, whether it terminated if she remarried, etc. In such cases, though, you can probably forget about the dower — she might be getting separate income, but in practice it’s all going into the “Family” pot in the abstract and standardized £10 manor. (Part of why this is all a bit wacky is that in the real world, manors were obviously not standardized at all.) In some places, I believe that freebench and dower were mutually exclusive — the widow did not get 1/3 unless she left the household (most often to remarry, I imagine). If you adopt that, this will not come up in situations in which a mother is continuing to live with the son and heir. - Pendragon describes the developed position in the common law, pretty much. But unsurprisingly, in the real world it was more complicated. Local customs varied — and courts could regard local custom as having the force of law. For instance, in Salford, freebench seems to have been the entirety of a widow’s rights, and there was no dower. In Bristol, you could at least make a case quite late (16th century) that dower only applied to what the husband had at the time of the marriage, not any subsequent acquisitions. In Lincoln, there was a custom that the dower only consisted of land that the husband held at the time of his death, not at any time during the marriage. I’m not sure how many of those specific examples are known definitely to be medieval, but they give the general picture. Early on, there were, I believe, cases where dower was only so long as the wife remained chaste and unmarried, although this is not the way it worked in the law as it eventually developed. So if this really bothers you, you can just declare that “The custom of Salisbury [or wherever] is [like Salford].” As with manors, there should “realistically” be more local variation in Pendragon in general — if a GM and their players want that headache! (And medieval England is comparatively *standardized* compared to the continent...) - If you really want to complicate this, though, as far as this sort of thing goes, Pendragon tends to default to the later common law — it’s the equivalent of how it would be if the game picked one period for military technology. You could instead have the game change the legal position of widows to match how the law developed in reality. Approximately — the following simplifies things a bit, even from my non-expert perspective. Someone who really knows their way around this would probably find it very oversimplified. But it’s about right. Uther/Anarchy: Equivalent to the 11th century. There is no hard-and-fast rule. A lord is expected to see to it that a widow receives some reasonable proportion of her husband’s lands to support her and her children, but the lord decides what is reasonable. Boy King/Conquest: Equivalent to the 12th century. Dower develops, and before the end of the Conquest period is firmly established as a common law rule. It applies only to the land that the husband had at the time of marriage, not any later acquisitions. Husbands can decide at the time of marriage what their wife will get at their deaths, but the wife can also go to law to claim her common law dower. Romance Period/Tournament: Equivalent to the 13th-early 14th centuries. The widow’s rights expand. By the end of the Romance Period, the dower comprises 1/3 of any lands that the husband had at any time during the marriage and that her children by him could inherit. This remains standard throughout the Tournament period. Grail/Twilight Periods: Equivalent to the mid-14th through 15th centuries. Legal ways for husbands to get around dower, such as jointure and use (see below), become common and although in law the widow’s position remains the same, in practice the widow’s rights diminish somewhat. Jointure: Jointure is where, as part of the marriage settlement, a portion of lands is set aside to be jointly held by both husband and wife and to go to the spouse who outlives the other — as an alternative to dower. In law, a widow (before 1536) could always reject this and claim her common law dower instead. But obviously that involves going to law to enforce her rights, and litigation is time-consuming, expensive, and uncertain. One author I looked at indicated that by about 1400 (beginning of the Twilight period) jointure was being treated as superseding dower, effectively if not in legal theory, and that as a result many widows were getting less than the “reasonable third” to which they were in law entitled. Use: Use was a situation where one granted land to someone else in return for them letting you retain the practically advantageous rights associated with it. Effectively, the grantor was in the position of the owner, but technically, it was the people to whom he had granted the land who owned it. This could be used as a dodge to get out of various obligations, including dower. If a husband had done this before marrying, the land was effectively his, but as he was not in law the person who was holding it, his wife had no claim on it after his death.

Anno CDLXXXVII: Madocus princeps cum classe magna ab Uterpendragon rege circum Loegriam missus est, et naves hostium permultas incenderunt. Proelia autem cum Saxonibus terra marique commissa sunt, in quibus omnibus praeter ultimum Madocus victor exstitit, et in illo ultimo, quod navale factum est in mari septentrionali, dubium est uter Britones an Saxones superassent. Postea Madocus princeps omnibus militibus, qui pro eo cum Saxonibus concertaverant, anulos aureos ad similitudinem draconis dedit. In hac expeditione Gerontius miles gregarius Sarisburiensis cum Madoco principe cum hostibus digne suo honore conflixit, sed amicus suus Godefridus metu maris tam terribiliter affectus est ut Rodericum comitem rogaret sibi permittere manerium suum Cornubiense visitare. Per hanc speciem Godefridus in terra mansit; sed frater suus Gilbertus cum Madoco navigavit et pugnavit sicut militi decebat. Itaque Gerontius atque Gilbertus anulis a Madoco principe donati sunt. Gerontius cum domum revenisset, equitationem in Cilcestriam cum Godefrido facere conatus est; nam pro certo habebat quod id Roderico comiti placiturum esset, atque ensem suum, quem a Gorlois duce cepisset et quo a milite Cilcestrensi spoliatus esset, recuperare cupiebat. Sed fortuna iniqua eos victoria privavit, et ambo a militibus Cilcestrensibus capti atque ad redemptiones positi sunt. As usual, some of the medievalisms here will make classical Latin purists grumpy. They will just have to deal. If anyone wants to throw this at their players, most of the first paragraph (everything except the final sentence) is the canon Naval Raids from the GPC for 487 — although as usual from a somewhat slanted pro-Pendragon perspective (which here doesn’t make as big an impact as in some years, as Madoc genuinely does come off fairly well out of this in the GPC — I’m looking forward to writing the entries for Uther’s conflict with Gorlois). (The other GPC 487 events were moved to other years in this campaign.)

I’ve thought vaguely about trying to mash up Good Society with Pendragon.

“To refuse ransom to a prisoner captured in warfare with an external enemy — in contrast to situations of rebellion — was regarded as among the most heinous of atrocities in war, for it negated the crucial assumption that, notwithstanding the price demanded, a captured nobleman could ultimately purchase his freedom.” Matthew Strickland (1996), War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066-1217, p 199. Of course, people in reality did things that were dishonourable all the time for pragmatic reasons, and there absolutely are instances of people refusing to ransom captives and getting away with it, such as if the captive was a very dangerous enemy. William Rufus held Helias de Maine for that reason — although that’s complicated by the duke of Normandy’s claim on Maine, which probably would allow Rufus at least to say that this so-called count of Maine was a rebel. In the real world, no-one expected people entirely to switch off their brains and do stupid things just to follow the rules. (There are also instances of kings showily releasing captives with no ransom at all, for entirely pragmatic reasons.) But I’d say that all things being equal, refusing to ransom a captive entirely after you have accepted his surrender should default to a significant loss, equivalent to breaking an oath. In many cases, it will be breaking an oath, as the ransom will have been agreed as part of the surrender. One thing is, though, that release seems often to have happened after the war was over — I think it’s doubtful that one would suffer any Honour loss for holding a prisoner until then. And if you can make a case that they’re a rebel, even if your claim is disputed, you probably have quite a lot of freedom to keep them indefinitely, or, indeed kill them, blind them, etc.

That’s actually what the bit about there being a difference in wars with external enemies and rebels was about, and you taking an Honour loss in the case of the former but not the latter. It should be a big Honour loss, too — it was viewed as one of the most horrific things you could do in war to refuse to ransom a nobleman (assuming he wasn’t a rebel), because it violated the basic understood agreement that gave every noble a special privileged position. But if you can take the Honour loss, go ahead... You should also suffer an Honour loss for not treating a non-noble captive with respect, which is where it really can be a money sink not just to release them on parole in return for them agreeing to pay you. Another story hook: a captive dies of natural causes (or were they...), but you are accused of having mistreated them, leading to their death, and suffer an Honour loss unless you can find a way to prove that you treated them with all due respect. Lords should routinely claim a share if we’re going to be historically accurate (which we don’t have to be, of course), although the amount varied greatly in time and place. And if the prisoner is particularly important (= the really lucrative ones), there’s a case for saying that they go to the king by prescriptive right, and while the king is expected to reward their captor, that reward will not amount to the full ransom of the prisoner. (This legal position is arguably assumed in the case of Octa in the GPC, and while it’s complicated by the fact that Saxons don’t recognize the practice of ransom, that doesn’t directly affect the legal relationship between Uther and the player knights.) That being said, I don’t worry too much about PKs accumulating money, because I can just give them Selfish checks, if they don’t give it away as gifts, as they are supposed to. 🙂 One of my players has been very lucky, and the main thing it’s enabled him to do is be noble and generous by offering to help out the other player, who has been much less lucky.

I’d exclude Traits under most circumstances — the main exception might be a Valorous roll to engage. Many Trait rolls are not very naturally connected to the idea of being disheartened, and it seems to me that the purpose of the rule is to discourage frivolous rolls for Inspiration, and it’s relatively rare that modifying a Trait is going to be a deterrent there. (I mean, if you took the rule very literally, you’d ask how it applied to the roll on the Stats Lost table following a Major Wound. 🙂 ) I must admit that I don’t let players roll again on a different Passion anyway if they fail with the first one, so it doesn’t come up. You get one shot at Inspiration, and if it fails, that’s what the character is obsessing about right then. If the situation changed significantly, I might allow a Famous Passion that was now relevant in a new way to override a failure on a non-Famous Passion.

I confine Madness to something like this (any clear-cut failure on a task inspired by a Famous Passion or a critical on a non-Famous Passion), or any situation in which the object of the Passion believes (rightly or wrongly) that you have failed to live up to a Famous Passion. (For things like Honour or Hospitality, the object is “society at large” rather than anyone specific.) The way in which Madness mechanically occurs in the game doesn’t seem to correspond well to the literature to my mind. Lancelot should be incapable of fumbling his Love (Guinevere) Passion, and while the GM is free simply to declare Madness under certain circumstances, a GM is generally going to be a little reluctant to do so without a rule. I’ve thought about implementing a rule in which you roll again on the Passion if you fail/are perceived by the object to have failed and success on that means more serious consequences.

creativehum’s thread about ransoms got me thinking, and I’ve been looking into the practice of ransom during the Middle Ages. Nothing very dramatic — basically, what I could read online. But some stuff that a GM might use in a Pendragon game:- - In some games, ransom might not exist in the Uther period. Background: it’s not as if the Middle Ages was the first time that anyone ever thought, “Hang on, we could get something for this guy, maybe?” What makes the medieval period different is that noblemen could *expect* to be ransomed, that it was institutionalized as a standard practice. There are basically two theories about when this came about. The first, which seems to be the more accepted one, puts it in northern France (in the modern sense of northern France, inc. Normandy) in the 10th and 11th centuries, and connects it to the development of the chivalric ethos. The second doesn’t see it as really becoming a standard expectation until the 12th century, and sees it as emerging from adoption of the Muslim practice of ransom in the context of the Crusades. Now, on the Cymri=Anglo-Normans model, there’s no doubt that, following theory 1, having ransom already there in the Uther period makes sense. But what if you *really* want to have Arthur be responsible for introducing chivalric ideas? If so, you might think about ransom only becoming normal as a new practice that Arthur introduces as part of his treatment of the rebels in 510. (Note: not saying that’s better, more consistent, or anything like that. It’s just an option if you want to paint Arthur in particularly chivalrous colors.) -I’d definitely think about taking sergeants off the list for earlier periods. Ransom for commoners only becomes normal in the Hundred Years War (=the Tournament Period), and it suits the game to have this be a development that happens during Arthur’s reign. - The game has very standardized ransoms, and to the extent that it suggests that they might vary, it suggests that proud captives might offer more. In fact, there was a lot of room for the captor to demand as much as he thought he could get. Families could be, and were, ruined by paying ransoms. Payments were often in installments. The entire thing was a question of negotiations, and there were very often documents giving the agreed terms. By the later Middle Ages, disputes over ransoms can be litigated — it is very possible for a captor to claim that they haven’t received a promised ransom when they have. Story hook: an unscrupulous captor arranges the theft of the letters of obligation giving the terms of the ransom agreement, and the former captive can no longer prove that they have paid in full. More interestingly, though, a ransom did not have to be in money. One could, for instance, demand that the ransomed captive demolish his castle. This is an area that one could exploit for the game. An obvious one is the ransom as quest hook: the captor demands that the captive or his friends achieve some “impossible” task as the ransom. -There is, however, an incentive for the captor not to demand too much and reach an agreement quickly — maintaining noble captives appropriately could be *hellishly* expensive. One could do a weird skewed variant on the Presumptuous Praetor adventure with a captive nobleman who’s dragging out negotiations for his ransom, and in the meantime your income is just draining away... - It was expected that noble captives in external wars would be ransomed, and there should be some Honour loss for not following the custom. But this did not apply to rebels, who were often ransomed but were not thought of as having the right to expect it. It is often hard for modern historians to disentangle ransoms from fines in medieval England, because an awful lot of the evidence pertains to rebels, whose ransoms might contain an additional (but not explicitly quantified) punitive element. But it can be kept in mind for Generous, Merciful, and Forgiving checks that there is no perceived obligation to ransom some captives at all. -The king of England was heavily involved in ransoms, from as early as the time of William the Conqueror, and important captives are supposed to be turned over to him, although he might generously give them back to their original captor. Ransoms also fell into the category of gains of which the king eventually (later 14th century) took a cut (1/9 - one-third to your captain, and then a third of that to the king). The king of France is different, incidentally. - From about the beginning of the fourteenth century, ransoms were hereditable. I.e., if you owe a ransom to someone, and he dies, then you owe a ransom to his heir — especially liable to happen where the ransom was being paid in installments. Prior to that, they were apparently intransmissible — which is an obvious adventure seed, with someone clandestinely arranging the murder of their captor to avoid paying the ransom, or being falsely accused of murder because the desire to get out of paying a ransom gives them a motive. Happy to be corrected by someone who is more knowledgeable about the history than I am.

For what it’s worth, there’s a (sort of) historical parallel. The later Anglo-Saxons didn’t have ransoming important prisoners as a standard custom of their own, but they paid plenty of ransoms to Viking raiders, who had a practice of capturing important people and demanding payment for their return.

Spelling in the Middle Ages was a bit random. I doubt it helped with Anglo-Norman French that by the time of Malory, people in England still used French for all sorts of things, but it was no longer anyone’s first language if they were from England itself. Mind you, their English spelling was chaotic, too. According to the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, the following are all also spellings of coeur in medieval Norman French: coer, coere, coeur, couer, cour; cuer, cueor, cueur, cuoer, cuor; qeor, qer, qeur, qoer, qor, qore; queer, queor, quer, quere, querre, queur; quoer, quoere, quoor, quor; qur, quuer. Meanwhile, in Middle English “heart” could be herte, hert, hart, harte, heorte, hort, horte, huerte, hurte, or hirte. Although all of those are probably closer to how the person spelling it actually was pronouncing the word than modern English “heart” is to how we pronounce it nowadays.

Paladin p. 104. It’s implied that the shield doesn’t reduce damage, although this is not 100% explicit. The rule in Pendragon 5e (at least in the core book) is a little different (p. 142): the shield provides a -5 modifier, not its armor value. But I prefer the Paladin rule, because it allows for for larger shields, magic shields, etc.

For Canada I’ll defer to any actual Canadians. I live in the US, and do have a little sense of the history here, although I didn’t grow up here. Historically, it was the case in the US that French was a very common second language in elite education, and that France was romanticized as the source of culture. There’s a specific obsession with Paris — you can see that image of the city in films like An American in Paris, and — to pick a reference that’s very appropriate on a Chaosium forum — Chambers’ The King in Yellow. I think a lot of this is a direct inheritance from English attitudes and was already there in the colonial period, but it persisted into the 20th century. It’s still the case that a certain kind of shop is liable to call itself something like La Belle Maison to signal that everything in it is in good taste. That being said, there’s also a negative stereotype of the French (which is very like the English one, although maybe less oriented towards sex), and that too is unfortunately persistent — one could see it coming into play in the debates over the Iraq War or in the sneers at John Kerry being able to answer a French journalist’s question in French. However, all this has faded a lot in recent decades — Spanish is far more often taught as a second language nowadays, and obviously Europe in general is no longer generally seen as The Source of culture. I suspect that many Americans do not think much about France one way or the other. With Finns, you could look in the other direction from Sweden to see a place where in the 19th century aristocrats were obsessed with being able to speak French...